A 2017 Discovery Grant from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage funded a yearlong exploration of how art, oral history, and inclusive collaboration might work to elicit, interpret, and share first-person experiences of institutionalization. Led by Lisa Sonneborn of the Institute on Disabilities at Temple University, our team of artists and thinking partners, including Donna Graves, Ruddy Roye, KC Chun Manning, Dan Keplinger, David Bradley, Maria T Rodriguez and Liz Green, collaborated with residents and staff at Selinsgrove to develop an “artist's residency.” As project planner and oral history artist, I worked to explore how putting oral history in dialogue with other artistic practices can expand what we think of as “story,” and move us toward a more radically inclusive practice, one that questions the privileging of the oral over other ways of showing lived experience.

This expansion is critical in order to inclusively document and activate the history of intellectual disability (ID), including accounts of institutionalization, the practice over the past century and into today of placing people with ID into segregated residential facilities. Much of what we know about institutional life is framed by case files and diagnoses, and not the memories, perspectives and experiences of people who lived, and still live, in institutions. 

Centering the lived experiences of institutionalization is key but when narrators are nonverbal, or use nontraditional communication, documenting and interpreting these experiences challenge the tools of oral history and other traditional documentary tools. Our group of artists -- oral historian, dancer, photographer, documentary filmmaker, and public historian -- worked with residents and staff to explore how different approaches to eliciting, documenting and sharing first-person experiences might bring more “voices” into our understanding of the history and present of institutionalization, and yield a different, more complex “story.”